May 19th, 2017

planes, trains, and automobiles

Great movie about the perils of travel. Well, Claire and I lived it yesterday. Most people don't know that Claire plays on the ISU Club softball team. The club team is somewhere between intermurals and the division one softball team. So Claire's been playing this spring and they've done quite well. They made it to the College World Series of the club softball division and so we headed to Georgia yesterday.
The flight was at 5:40 AM out of Minneapolis so we decided to leave around midnight because we have to get checked in and everything didn't quite know how long it was going to take. The trip there went OK, it was a little bit rainy and I don't like to drive in rain and I don't like to drive at night but we got there OK. We decided to travel with another player and her parents from Spirit Lake and met them at the gate. There are quite a few other planes leaving from Southwest and everybody else leaves except us. Our plane had mechanical issues.

They delayed the plane of three or four times and finally just canceled the flight. So people are obviously are completely thrilled about that and now what do we do? The problem with Southwest flying out of Minneapolis is that they don't reciprocate with any of the other airlines and we can't just all hop on another flight and it won't be a big deal. No. They have only about three agents working on trying to help this plane load of people to get rerouted. As we stood in line I tweeted to Southwest Airlines about this and they responded very quickly. My first thought was that Southwest airlines hired some college graduate to sit in a cubicle and watch Twitter all day. Well they got lots of tweets yesterday. They responded back quite quickly every single time because my friend also was tweeting. Of course there's always the one guy that is really rude and vocal and made the attendant (male) cry. Fortunately our guy Aaron SAVED the day.

Aaron rocked the man bun and he got us on a flight with Delta from Minneapolis to Atlanta. Of course it has to be in the opposite terminal so that was another half hour trip to get from one side of the airport to the other. And another four hour wait to get on that flight. We finally got to Atlanta at about 6:30pm. Then we had to get a rental car and again escalators and walking sidewalks and above the ground train tram thing, half hour later we have a car. Then we have to get to Columbus. If you've never been to Georgia and I haven't - first time -my first impression is that they are crazy drivers. There were five lanes of traffic and some cars used every single one of them to try to get to their destination. I think we were passed by no less than 30 cars going at least 90 miles an hour. I was praying the whole entire way. So we made it and will see how the rest of the week goes. Stay tuned.